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World passes 30% renewables milestone for the first time, decline of fossil inevitable
(www.euronews.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2024
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We would still be at a pre-industrial level of technology. Without having an easily accessible and highly energy dense fuel (coal) to kick us off, none of modern society, including renewables, would be possible.
That's largely ahistorical.
The invention of the dynamo, combined with early industrial wind and water wheels, would have changed where and how we were able to efficiently industrialize. But we had the capacity even without discovering large coal fields in the American coal belt, Russia, and Australia. Hydroelectric dams and heavy investment in wind turbine engineering would have yielded steady surpluses in domestic electricity across a different distribution of domestic real estate.
What large cheap surplus deposits of coal gave us was an opportunity to put off investing in nuclear energy for the better part of a century. Nuclear power is generally cheaper, cleaner, and more abundant than coal. And we had industrial scale nuclear powered electricity plants by the 1950s, with nuclear shipping made possible through the prototype NS Savannah in 1961.
Coal's biggest benefit wasn't its energy density nearly so much as its portability. Unlike with wind and hydro, you weren't geographically constrained in where you could build. And unlike with nuclear, you didn't have these huge upfront engineering and R&D costs.
Coal boosted the efficiency of early industrial mass transit and allowed a rapid colonization of the frontier regions. But it required the same continual westward expansion to tap cheap labor markets and access new coal fields. Hydro was far more energy dense. Nuclear was late to the party. Wind was temperamental and needed significantly more engineering prowess to harness efficiently. But all of these were solvable problems within the span of decades.
In my country we have about 40% hydroelectric plant. They are reliable. Water mills and tide might be something that started the industry.
Keep in mind that many big cites are located near the ocean. Many benefits from water.
Today many companies throw as much money as they can at renewables. They are simply cheaper but limited the amount of opportunities. Example Google could not find enough clean energy to cover their own footprint. Google have a lot of many that they don't know what to do and want to be climate neutral for their data centers. It is much faster to put in new energy hungry graphic cards the getting a new power source running.
We would certainly have valued hydrothermal and other clean sources a lot more. Iceland could have been a superpower.